In the 50s, Abstract Expressionism was one of the main assets of the CIA in the propaganda war of the United States against the Soviet Union. This was so, because, as an artistic movement, Abstract Expressionism was being held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US, against which the Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete. As effective as it may have been, Abstract Expressionism started giving way to the emerging Pop Art culture, which used the iconography of television, photography, comics, cinema and advertising as the main subject of the arts in order to celebrate post-war consumerism. Pop Art, in turn, while defying the psychology of Abstract Expressionism, happened to worship the same god of materialism that the sponsors of Abstract Expressionism had set up to promote.